The Bisti Business

by Don Travis

  “Ya-tah-heh,” he returned Jazz’s greeting in Navajo.

  After a brief exchange, Jazz glanced over his shoulder and waved me forward. Henry ignored me as I got out of the car; his sharp eyes were centered on his brother’s ripped britches and bloody hands.

  “Man, what happened?”

  “Got bushwhacked,” Jazz answered.

  “Shit, you okay? I shoulda stayed to help you out.”

  “Naw. You did right. You know, getting Lando outa there.”

  Concern turned to friendly joshing when Henry realized his brother was okay. Jazz admitting he’d thought I was the car on his tail set Henry to chuckling, his version of gales of laughter. Then Henry turned to me.

  “Good to see you, Mr. Vinson.”

  “It’s about time you started calling me BJ, okay? And it’s good to see you too. I was worried.”

  “No need. That guy wasn’t gonna get us. Not even if Jazz hadn’t started honking his horn. I’d been watching them for at least five minutes. You can hear a car coming a mile away out here.”

  “Where’s Lando?”

  “Inside. Man, he’s screwed-up. I’ve got him primed, but he’s still not too keen about facing you.”

  “Has he mentioned Dana?”

  “Uh-uh, and we haven’t either.”

  “Good. Screwed-up how?”

  “He’s not here. You know, not facing up to things. Either he doesn’t remember anything or else he’s being sneaky. Seems scared of his shadow one minute and feisty as hell the next. You know, screwed-up.”

  “I guess I would be too, if I’d gone through what he has. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Not even a skinned nose, unlike somebody else I know.” Henry cut his eyes at his brother. Jazz grinned but kept quiet.

  “Where’d you get the rifle? I didn’t see a scabbard on the bike.”

  “No, but there’s one in the Wrangler. This is Jazz’s. How we gonna do this?”

  “I’d like to talk to Lando alone if there’s someplace you guys can wait.”

  “Sure.” Henry motioned with his head. “A hogan’s always got a brush shelter. Not much brush left to this one, but it throws off some shade. We’ll be okay.”

  “Good. You and Jazz introduce me to Lando, and then go wait there.”

  “You’re the boss.” Jazz turned and led the way into the cabin.

  As my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, I was impressed again at how roomy these traditional hogans were on the inside. The log walls and thick roof beams topped by a layer of sod kept the temperature cool—relatively speaking. As my sight gradually returned, I concentrated on a figure pressed against the rear wall to the left of a window with its glass punched out. Dust motes floated through a shaft of bright sunlight.

  “Hey, man.” Jazz walked over to Lando. “This is the guy we told you about. You know, Mr. Vinson, but he just asked us to call him BJ, so I guess that’s what he wants you to call him too.” Jazz rattled on about his recent experience, probably intending to put Lando at ease, but he could have picked a better topic.

  “Mr. Vinson. Uh, BJ, this is Lando Alfano.”

  I stepped forward slowly. Afraid of spooking the kid, I didn’t offer to shake hands. “Good to meet you. Can you tell me your name?”

  “Jazz just told you.” The tone was closed, hostile.

  “Yes, but I want to hear it from you.”

  “Lando.” His light baritone made him sound almost as macho as Henry.

  “Lando what?”

  “Orlando,” he said, as if it were an effort to remember. His voice strengthened. “Orlando Alfano. They call me Lando for short.”

  “Good to meet you,” I repeated. “You have no idea how long I’ve been looking for you. Your brother says to say hello.”

  Lando, who had been studying something on the dirt floor, glanced up at the mention of his brother. “Aggie? You talked to Aggie?”

  “Couple of hours ago.”

  Jazz spoke up again. “Look, me ’n’ Henry gotta go take a leak. Then we’re gonna find some shade and bullshit a little. You need us, you let out a yell, and we’ll come running, okay?”

  The kid started to protest, but Jazz and Henry swept through the doorway chattering like—well, like brothers.

  “It’s okay, Lando. I’m here to help. Let’s sit down and talk for a minute.” The hogan was completely bare, so I moved over beside him and sat in the dirt with my back against the wall. He slowly slid down beside me.

  The Orlando Alfano of two months ago would have been horrified by his appearance and condition. He gave off the odor of something old and moldy. His face, silhouetted in the light streaming through the broken window, seemed mottled—dirt, probably—but the teeth were white and strong, and the bone structure, although blurred by facial hair, was good. Dirt, ratty clothing, wild uncombed hair, straggly whiskers—none of that could hide his good looks. Lando would clean up as handsome as the picture on the poster I’d had made up. He’d probably lost weight but wasn’t emaciated.

  “You want to tell me about it, Lando?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the man your brother asked to find you.”

  “Aggie asked you to find me?”

  “Yes.” Lando hadn’t panicked at the mention of Aggie’s name, so I chose that lie. “Hired me, actually. And I’ve been busy at it. Found your room at the Sheraton in Albuquerque. Traced you to Chesty Westey’s out at the Continental Divide.” I smiled. “You and Dana made quite an impression. They remembered you weeks after you danced for them.”

  “D… Dana?” The word was tentative but oddly hopeful.

  “That’s okay, Lando. I know what happened to Dana, but before we talk about that—”

  “What? What happened to him? Been looking for him. Everywhere. Where’s Dana?”

  Aw hell. The kid didn’t know. And I couldn’t risk telling him, not until I got all I could out of him. So I changed the subject.

  “Did you know your car was stolen?”

  He rubbed his face with a grimy, trembling paw. “Had to leave it. Man was chasing me. Shot at me. Followed me after—” He broke off, and the look on his face scared the hell out of me. He scrambled to get away. I caught his arm and pulled him back to a sitting position. He was beginning to remember something. If I pressed him, he might freak out. I stayed on the subject of the Porsche.

  “Yeah, a couple of kids boosted it out on Halmstead Road where you left it. I hate to tell you this, but they took it back home to Taos and drove it over the Rio Grande Gorge. That beautiful orange Boxster is nothing but a pile of junk now.”

  “Dana! It wasn’t Dana, was it? I mean, he didn’t—”

  “No, it was two local kids.” I twisted around to face him. “When did you realize someone was following you?”

  For a moment I thought I’d pushed the wrong button, but after a lengthy pause, he began talking, his words hesitant, as if he was recalling some of it as he spoke.

  Neither he nor Dana had any idea they were being followed until the day they went to the Bisti badlands, but something went wrong in the relationship before that fateful side trip.

  As he paused to lick his lips, trying to work some saliva into a dry mouth, I asked a risky question.

  “Was Dana getting together with Jazz the problem?”

  He froze for a moment and then faced me, his dark, hollow eyes full of questions, his face flushed. “They got together? Dana and Jazz?”

  “Everyone says you and Dana had a fight over it.”

  He leaned against the wall again. “We did? I don’t remember.” He shook his head to clear it. “Maybe we did. I came back from somewhere—an art gallery, I think—and saw Jazz leave the motel. Yeah, we argued about it. We did. And I was pissed. Really mad. But….”

  I waited out the silence as he struggled to clear the cobwebs from his mind. His limbs spasmed in agitation. Apparently, Lando didn’t find what he was looking for because he returned to Jazz and Dana.

  “That hurt. Hu
rt a lot, but I kinda understood it. Jazz is sexy.” His voice lost volume.

  Deciding not to press, I tried to take him back to Bisti. “Okay, so you went to Bisti the next day. How were things between you and Dana then?”

  “Kinda strained, but it got better when we walked through that weird place. It was wonderful, you know—eerie wonderful. We got caught up in it and forgot everything else. It got easy again. We were okay.” He hid his face in his palms. “Except things had changed.”

  “Changed how, Lando?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Because Dana was buying drugs?”

  “What?” He sat up straight, and some of the Alfano steel showed briefly. “Dana didn’t buy drugs. He hated drugs as much as I did. He just… we just smoked a little pot now and then. But we wouldn’t touch the other stuff. That’s part of why we got together.”

  He cut his eyes over at me, probably to judge my reaction to his relationship. It surprised me he was sensitive about it. He’d acknowledged who he was, and he struck me as the kind of guy willing to pay the piper for his decisions. Still, it was understandable in a way because of his father’s strong reaction to his homosexuality.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The guy he’d been with was on drugs. Started out smoking joints but graduated to crack and Ecstasy and worse—meth. Dana couldn’t stand being around the heavy stuff, so he left. I guess I caught him on the rebound.”

  “Okay, did it have anything to do with Dana trying to talk you into supporting the De Falco buyout?”

  His eyes widened and flashed dangerously. “You know about that? Who sent you? Papa?”

  “I told you, I’m here on behalf of Aggie. Didn’t Dana try to talk you into financing the deal with your mother’s trust? Or maybe he was trying to talk you out of it.”

  “No, he never did that. At least, I don’t think he did.” Lando shook his head again. “No, he never tried to talk me into it. Or out of it, either. He’s not very interested in our family’s affairs.”

  “But he knew about the pending deal, didn’t he?”

  “Sure. I told him all about it.” Then Lando came back to the question I didn’t want to talk about until I knew what had happened at Bisti that day. “Where’s Dana? I need to see Dana.”

  “Later. Right now tell me a little more about Bisti.”

  “That’s where I first saw the man. Down there.”

  “Who? What man.”

  “I don’t know who he was, but he knew who we were. He called us by name.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Just a man. Middle-aged, I guess. He was losing his hair, and he had this big forehead.”

  Santillanes. The LA investigator had most likely approached them at Bisti because the two young men were isolated and vulnerable.

  “Was he alone?” I asked.

  “I guess so. He just walked up and said he had to talk to me. Said it was family business and asked Dana to leave us alone for a minute. I thought Papa had sent him, so I told Dana to take a walk.”

  “Dana left?”

  “Yeah. He went back over the hill to look at a big petrified log we’d passed.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he—the man—tried to take me with him. I thought maybe he was a closet queen or something, but that wasn’t it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He pulled a gun on me and ordered me to go with him.”

  Lando, even with a gun in his face, had refused. The stranger lost patience and threatened to kill Dana. When Lando yelled a warning, the man slammed him on the head with the barrel of his pistol. Stunned, but still conscious, Lando managed to stay on his feet. When his assailant whirled to see if Dana had come running, Lando shoved him into the dirt and took off to draw the nut job away from his friend. He managed to elude his pursuer, but upon reaching the Porsche, he found the man had anticipated him. Lando barely got the motor started before the PI fired at the car. Praying Dana would hide until he could lose the madman on his tail, Lando peeled out onto the road, watching in the rearview mirror as his pursuer recovered his own car and raced after him.

  “But the Ford was no match for the Porsche,” he finished wearily. “I was halfway to Farmington before he got out on the highway.”

  “Did you go to the police?” I asked. He shook his head. “Why not?”

  “I needed to find out what was going on? I had to call somebody first. But… but I couldn’t.” That puzzled look was back on his face again.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I just couldn’t. Something….” His voice died away, and he shrugged in resignation. “I’d been hit on the head, man. I wasn’t thinking straight. But I remember something else. There was another car in the Bisti parking lot when I left.”

  “Besides the one Santillanes was driving?”

  “Santillanes?”

  “The man who was chasing you.”

  “You know who he is?”

  I nodded. “Was. He’s dead. Shot.”

  “Shot? Who did it?”

  “The FBI thinks you did.”

  The shock on Lando’s face was genuine—I’d have bet on it. Outrage gave way to despair, and worse, to fear.

  “But I know that’s not true,” I said. “You didn’t shoot Santillanes.”

  “Dana?”

  “Dana didn’t either. He couldn’t have.”

  He lifted his haunted eyes to meet my gaze. “How do you know?”

  “Because Dana was already dead by the time Santillanes was shot.”

  He wobbled like he was swooning. “Dead. Dana’s dead? How?” The whites of his eyes showed; the pupils contracted. He slammed his head against the wall.

  “Strangled down at Bisti. On that same day.”

  I lost him then. He slumped forward. “My fault! My fault. I shouldn’t have left him. Oh, God! Oh, God!”

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  Chapter 29

  AS LANDO collapsed, I grabbed his shoulder and pressed him against the wall. Slack, lifeless, he was like an empty bag of skin until his anguish came pouring out in wracking sobs. I took a moment to bring my own emotions under control at finding Lando alive before speaking. Besides, he needed time to absorb the worst body blow of his life.

  “I need your help.”

  No response.

  “I intend to find out who killed your friend… your lover. He must have been quite a man to deserve your devotion. You could have given that love to anyone, but you chose him. So that makes him a worthy person.”

  He straightened his spine and seemed to grab on to some inner strength. His brown eyes glowed. “He is… was a good guy. A great guy.” Lando gulped air and met my gaze for the first time. “If he was killed because he was gay, I want you to find the bigoted son of a bitch who did it. If he was killed because”—his voice caught in his throat—“because of me, I want someone to pay. What do you want me to do?”

  We sat in the dirt in that hogan for another hour while I probed his family relationships, friendships, his homosexuality, everything and anything in the hope something would kick-start a thought process that would tell me what I really wanted to know: Why he hadn’t reached out to his family when he got into trouble. I learned little I didn’t already know or suspect except that his first gay experience with a soccer mate on a team trip to Sacramento was more an act of defiance than desire, but when he met Dana Norville at an immigration rights meeting on the UCLA campus, the pump was already primed, and he overflowed. It was the first solid connection he experienced where he did not feel someone was currying favor because of the Alfano money.

  He avoided involving himself in the family business beyond working for Tom Scavo in the lab during his high school years, but that changed with the De Falco proposal. When his mother expressed her reluctance to use the Sabelito Trust to finance the buyout and Aggie opposed it outright, Lando plucked up the courage to place h
imself between his frail mother and his demanding father.

  What Aggie had neglected to tell me—or perhaps did not know—was that Mona had given Lando a written power of attorney to act for her in the matter. As a consequence, Alfano turned his considerable pressure on his younger son, who simply walked away, taking Dana with him on a visit to the southwest to isolate himself until the De Falco matter fell of its own weight.

  I now understood why he would not accept calls from his father on the trip, but I was not completely convinced that was the reason Lando did not turn to Alfano when things went wrong. Although Lando would not admit it, it was obvious he considered Santillanes was sent by his father to bring him home. He was probably right.

  None of that mattered at the moment. The task now was to decide what to do with Lando. He should be handed over to the FBI or the sheriff, but his emotional condition gave me pause. Besides, I wanted to talk to Del Dahlman first. It was after six, so he should have arrived in Farmington by now. Maybe he would have some lawyer’s trick up his sleeve to justify a delay in handing over the kid without getting us all into trouble.

  Henry agreed to stay with Lando at the hogan while Jazz and I returned to Farmington. Jazz insisted he didn’t need to be checked out at the hospital, but he wanted to make arrangements to recover his Jeep. I promised to rent another vehicle so Jazz could bring water and other supplies, including sleeping bags, since they would be remaining overnight. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea for another reason. If we decided to hide Lando a little longer, a clean vehicle no one else knew about might come in handy.

  DEL DAHLMAN smiled as he sat across the small table from me in my motel room and took in the faded, thirty-year-old wallpaper, two laminated walnut headboards bolted to the wall, and the fifties-style gooseneck double lamp on a table between the two beds.

  “Reminds me of the days we used to prowl the state back when… we were younger,” he said, hedging more than just a little. He was referring to the time he was a brand-new lawyer and I was a city cop. There had been a strong attraction between us from the day we met, and when we discovered a shared passion for small, historic towns in remote corners of the state, we believed we would share a long and wonderful life together. A fugitive’s bullet in my thigh—helped along by a handsome hustler who captured Del’s fancy—put an end to our four-year relationship.